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| Anonymous Photographer Metalworker, USA ca. 1840-60 hand-colored daguerreotype Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson Newhaven Fishermen ca. 1843-47 carbon print Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh |
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| Anonymous Photographer Laundress, France 1848-50 hand-colored daguerreotype Getty Museum, Los Angeles |
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| Anonymous Photographer Three Shepherds ca. 1850-60 hand-colored daguerreotype Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Joseph Cundall Drummer, Great Britain ca. 1856 salted paper print from glass negative Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Hugh Welch Diamond Asylum Patient, Surrey ca. 1850-58 albumen silver print Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Anonymous Photographer Chamber Footman, Russia ca. 1875-80 albumen print Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
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| Wilhelm Lapré The Courier, Nikolai Nesterov ca. 1882 albumen print Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
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| August Sander Blacksmiths, Germany 1926 gelatin silver print Tate Gallery, London |
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| Lisette Model Peanut Vendor, Nice ca. 1933-38 gelatin silver print Getty Museum, Los Angeles |
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| Robert Frank Men's Room, Railway Station, Memphis, Tennessee 1955-56 gelatin silver print Art Institute of Chicago |
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| Danny Lyon Boy with Dog, Knoxville, Tennessee 1967 gelatin silver print Art Institute of Chicago |
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| Jonas Dovydenas Adolescent Boy, Manchester, Kentucky 1971 gelatin silver print Minneapolis Institute of Art |
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| Miroslav Tichý Shopkeeper, Czechoslovakia ca. 1975 photograph Tichý Ocean Foundation, Prague |
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| Marketa Luskacova Woman and Man with Bread Spitalfields, London 1976 gelatin silver print Tate Gallery, London |
"One is concerned with what prevents representation as much as what allows it; one studies blindness as much as vision. . . . There are silences which demand explanation, just as there are statements which ask to be ignored. . . . In The Golden Bowl Henry James puts the matter thus – Charlotte has just expressed delight in the shopkeeper who has served the heroes – "The Prince was to reply to this that he himself hadn't looked at him; as, precisely, in the general connexion, Charlotte had more than once, from other days noted, for his advantage, her consciousness of how, below a certain social plane, he never saw . . . . He took throughout, always, the meaner sort for granted – the night of their meanness or whatever name one might give it for him made all his cats grey."
– T.J. Clark, from Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the Second French Empire, 1848-1851 (New York Graphic Society, 1973)